Talent retention continues to be a challenge for India Inc even in times of slowdown. The figures tell the story. India will need around 85-90 million workers - a majority of it in the services sector - over the next five years, according to a new report launched by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
The report titled 'India's Demographic Dilemma' indicates that while the shortage of skilled and qualified labour remains a problem, employability is a more critical issue. If employability is factored in, the talent gap swidens to more than 5 million people by 2012.
The report further estimates a shortfall of around 200,000 engineers, 400,000 non-engineering graduates/post-graduates and 150,000 vocationally-trained workers over the next five years - all of which will pose a unique challenge for the country. It has identified four high growth sectors - IT-ITeS, banking, retail and healthcare- that heavily rely on skilled labour and are likely to face a massive talent crunch in the next five years.
“Lack of defined standards for skill identification is a major challenge that we are faced with today. We need more awareness about the growing sectors and then only can we find the best people for the right jobs,” notes Madan Padaki, co-founder and CEO, MeritTrac Services.
The Bangalore-based HR assesment company has started an internal programme called Track Skills that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of employees and trains them on their weaknesses. The company has another initiative called NAC-Tech and NAC-BPO which is a NASSCOM initiative with MeritTrac as the assessment partner.
These industry standard assessment and certification programs facilitate the transformation of a “trainable" workforce into an "employable" workforce and are aimed to provide inputs for enhancing employability, hence creating a robust and continuous pipeline of talent for the IT, Engineering and BPO Industries. Since its inception, over 14,000 candidates have been tested under the NAC-Tech program by reaching out to 135 campuses.
“There are more challenges specially in the employability and deployability of freshers who learn more on the job compared to what they learn in colleges. While our trainees are on the bench for 9-12 months, we customose the curriculum for them so that they also learn by doing things,” notes Prameela Kalive, Global Head HR, Zensar Technologies.
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Vijay Thadani, CEO, NIIT Ltd, concurs: “Jobs will always outnumber the employable workforce. In IT, for instance, skilled networking engineers and sales and marketing people are always required. Similarly, other growth sectors like retail, healthcare management and hospitality can be great employers if the right people are found for the jobs.”
“The formal education system both at the school and the college level needs to be overhauled through a set of measures that include increased government funding, accountability through accreditation and greater private sector participation through deregulation. These are needed to meet the short-term exigencies faced by the services industry," says Janmejaya Sinha, MD, BCG.
The retail sector, too, faces challenges in workforce and formats that can be solved by a combination of grooming in–house talent, attracting outside talent through better working conditions and pay and relevant training seems is the answer. For instance, Bharti retail - in collaboration with Walmart - has opened six stores in Punjab where the local fruit sellers were trained by the telecom giant. These vendors now work for four hours in the morning in these stores. Bharti plans to expand such chain of stores across India by training the local sabziwallahs.
Incidentally, the CII-BCG report notes, the healthcare sector needs an increase in the supply of doctors, nurses and paramedics by ramping up the number of medical colleges and that can happen by scaling up healthcare infrastructure and introducing ‘hybrid’ roles by increasing the responsibilities of paramedics.